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Contrastive reinforcement learning (CRL) learns goal-conditioned Q-values through a contrastive objective over state-action and goal representations, removing the need for hand-crafted reward functions. Despite impressive success in…

Solving tasks with sparse rewards is one of the most important challenges in reinforcement learning. In the single-agent setting, this challenge is addressed by introducing intrinsic rewards that motivate agents to explore unseen regions of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-05-25 Shariq Iqbal , Fei Sha

Reinforcement Learning (RL) policies are designed to predict actions based on current observations to maximize cumulative future rewards. In real-world applications (i.e., non-simulated environments), sensors are essential for measuring the…

Prior work has proposed a simple strategy for reinforcement learning (RL): label experience with the outcomes achieved in that experience, and then imitate the relabeled experience. These outcome-conditioned imitation learning methods are…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-02-21 Benjamin Eysenbach , Soumith Udatha , Sergey Levine , Ruslan Salakhutdinov

Residential demand response programs aim to activate demand flexibility at the household level. In recent years, reinforcement learning (RL) has gained significant attention for these type of applications. A major challenge of RL algorithms…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2024-03-13 Thijs Peirelinck , Chris Hermans , Fred Spiessens , Geert Deconinck

Policy robustness in Reinforcement Learning may not be desirable at any cost: the alterations caused by robustness requirements from otherwise optimal policies should be explainable, quantifiable and formally verifiable. In this work we…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-12-12 Daniel Jarne Ornia , Licio Romao , Lewis Hammond , Manuel Mazo , Alessandro Abate

While policy-based reinforcement learning (RL) achieves tremendous successes in practice, it is significantly less understood in theory, especially compared with value-based RL. In particular, it remains elusive how to design a provably…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-04-02 Qi Cai , Zhuoran Yang , Chi Jin , Zhaoran Wang

We consider the problem of using multiple agents to harvest data from a collection of sensor nodes (targets) scattered across a two-dimensional environment. These targets transmit their data to the agents that move in the space above them,…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2025-08-25 Shili Wu , Yancheng Zhu , Aniruddha Datta , Sean B. Andersson

Autonomous agents must often deal with conflicting requirements, such as completing tasks using the least amount of time/energy, learning multiple tasks, or dealing with multiple opponents. In the context of reinforcement learning~(RL),…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-10-30 Santiago Paternain , Luiz F. O. Chamon , Miguel Calvo-Fullana , Alejandro Ribeiro

Reinforcement learning (RL) trained language model agents with tool access are increasingly deployed in coding assistants, research tools, and autonomous systems. We introduce the Reward Hacking Benchmark (RHB), a suite of multi-step tasks…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-06 Kunvar Thaman

Safe reinforcement learning (RL) aims to learn policies that satisfy certain constraints before deploying them to safety-critical applications. Previous primal-dual style approaches suffer from instability issues and lack optimality…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-06-20 Zuxin Liu , Zhepeng Cen , Vladislav Isenbaev , Wei Liu , Zhiwei Steven Wu , Bo Li , Ding Zhao

This paper deals with distributed policy optimization in reinforcement learning, which involves a central controller and a group of learners. In particular, two typical settings encountered in several applications are considered:…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-04-21 Tianyi Chen , Kaiqing Zhang , Georgios B. Giannakis , Tamer Başar

The objectives of option hedging/trading extend beyond mere protection against downside risks, with a desire to seek gains also driving agent's strategies. In this study, we showcase the potential of robust risk-aware reinforcement learning…

Computational Finance · Quantitative Finance 2023-12-27 David Wu , Sebastian Jaimungal

Reinforcement learning (RL) is a central problem in artificial intelligence. This problem consists of defining artificial agents that can learn optimal behaviour by interacting with an environment -- where the optimal behaviour is defined…

Proactive task-oriented agents must autonomously anticipate user needs, identify actionable opportunities, and trigger software actions at appropriate moments - fundamentally shifting from reactive systems that await explicit instructions.…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-05-26 Lei Ding , Bin He , Chenguang Wang , Yang Liu

No real-world reward function is perfect. Sensory errors and software bugs may result in RL agents observing higher (or lower) rewards than they should. For example, a reinforcement learning agent may prefer states where a sensory error…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2017-08-22 Tom Everitt , Victoria Krakovna , Laurent Orseau , Marcus Hutter , Shane Legg

The optimal objective is a fundamental aspect of reinforcement learning (RL), as it determines how policies are evaluated and optimized. While total return maximization is the ideal objective in RL, discounted return maximization is the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-03-19 Shuyu Yin , Fei Wen , Peilin Liu , Tao Luo

In many real-world applications, reinforcement learning (RL) agents might have to solve multiple tasks, each one typically modeled via a reward function. If reward functions are expressed linearly, and the agent has previously learned a set…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-06-24 Lucas N. Alegre , Ana L. C. Bazzan , Bruno C. da Silva

Heuristic algorithms such as simulated annealing, Concorde, and METIS are effective and widely used approaches to find solutions to combinatorial optimization problems. However, they are limited by the high sample complexity required to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-06-18 Qingpeng Cai , Will Hang , Azalia Mirhoseini , George Tucker , Jingtao Wang , Wei Wei

Deep reinforcement learning (DRL) faces significant challenges in addressing the hard-exploration problems in tasks with sparse or deceptive rewards and large state spaces. These challenges severely limit the practical application of DRL.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-01-03 Guojian Wang , Faguo Wu , Xiao Zhang , Ning Guo , Zhiming Zheng